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wrote: “Hooah!” He promised to visit Aberdeen at some point, although coyly he refused to say when.
    Alfred’s letter arrived during the week when Michelle was tackling her fourth gun. She had already mastered the rifle, the machine gun, and the automatic grenade launcher. Now she had begun studying the M9 semiautomatic. On a carefree, Indian summer kind of day, Michelle had all the pieces of a 9mm laid out across her desk when a drill sergeant named Mark Reed burst into the classroom. Reed was a thirty-six-year-old noncommissioned officer (NCO) in the marine corps, with olive skin and chiseled features. One week earlier, he had taught the class how to operate the .50-caliber. Now Reed appeared jangled. A plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center, he announced. Other planes had been hijacked, too, and one was in the air somewhere over Pennsylvania. The base represented a potential target. Reed told the students that if they heard anything unusual, they should jump out of the window and lie down close to the building. Then he left.
    Michelle looked down at the pieces of the 9mm strewn across her desk. Should she reassemble the gun? But the training models were held together with wire and pins, and she had no bullets. The absurdity of her situation struck Michelle: she was a trained soldier on a military base studying weapons, and yet she did not have a gun that would fire. Why did Reed want her to jump out of the window and lie down next to the building? That seemed like a dumb thing to do. Michelle felt unarmed, defenseless. When the instructor released them for their midmorning break, the students spilled out of the room. Many of them rushed to the bank of pay phones over by the vending machines. Michelle stood in line waiting to call her mother, but the base command turned off the pay phones before she got her chance. They had decided that it might be a security risk to let anyone call out. This left Michelle rattled. So did the increased security measures—drill sergeants organized night patrols and had everyone sign in and out at the entrance to each building.
    That evening, a crowd gathered in the common room to watch the impossible images—the passenger planes flying too low, the shuddering collapse of the towers. The room filled with noise as the soldiers hollered army chants and thundered, “HOOAH!” The weird energy in the room disturbed Michelle as much as the unbelievable images on the television screen. All that billowing dust met by this angry glee. Why were her classmates cheering? She felt so afraid that she didn’t even know she wasafraid and instead had the unsettling sense that the scene around her had become surreal. Michelle felt cut off from the other people in the room, as if they were walled off behind glass. Money for college, a viable future—that’s all she had meant to sign up for. But as she watched the first tower fall and then the second one, and saw smoke pouring out of a hole in the Pentagon, she saw that she was also watching the collapse of her pretty expectations. The notions she had cherished in the spring, when she had brought Noah along to talk to the recruiters—the idea that they would upgrade their lives while also getting in better shape and risking nothing essential—now appeared vain and foolish. Her future seemed dim and freighted and hard to discern, but she could see already that it would be nothing like what she had imagined.

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Don’t Worry About Being a Female
    D EBBIE HELTON REGARDED herself a daddy’s girl, and her father had been a drill sergeant in the US Army. Seeking to emulate him, she had joined the Army National Guard when she was thirty-four years old, and by the fall of 2001, at age forty-nine, she had become one of the longest-serving women in the Indiana National Guard’s 113th Support Battalion, based in Bedford, Indiana, where she was a weapons specialist—41C (“forty-one